Stephen Bann (ed.): The Tradition of Constructivism (1974)
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“With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their ‘Realistic Manifesto’, constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of El Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman—many of which have never before been available in English—and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.”
With an introduction by Stephen Bann
Publisher Viking Press, 1974
Documents of 20th-Century Art series
ISBN 0670019569, 9780670019564
334 pages
Review: Susan Compton (Slavic Review 1975).
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-15)
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I bought this book at the Strand Bookstore on Broadway my first year of architecture school in the mid-80s and read every word. I haven’t looked at the book for years, but have never forgotten the ideas that it introduced me to. Despite a hint of nostalgia that this post elicits, the effect of this book is anything but…